Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often | Hacker News Reader

Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

208 pointsrms_returns162 comments

I'd made a similarly titled post[1] a couple years back and I seriously don't know what kind of usage DuckDuckGo has right now. But I'd like to think that it is extensively used, at least in the developer community. And I strongly believe that people should start degoogling their lives at least slowly and gradually if its not possible to do it at once. If more people start using DDG, the search engine will improve and that least that one aspect of degoogling could be achieved to a certain extent.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284917

View on HN

I have used it as a default for at least 2 years. I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches, mostly around technology. Probably a bit less than that for general searches.

Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often.

DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain. Any Amazon links are always to .com and not the regional site. Just a general understanding of region specific results seems to be missing, and I end up qualifying searches with the country or town.

I switched to DDG about half a year ago. What I really like is that for me I can switch location bias on and off. Sometimes I want region specific results, but most of the time not, so I actually get better results on DDG.

> DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain.

DDG also skews heavily to US results which is one reason I find DDG useful.

I have been largely using DDG for years. What finally drove me away from Google completely is that you cannot get search results that are untainted by localization anymore. Whenever I search for programming related topics or the subjects typically discussed on HN I always get a some confusing local results no matter what language and region settings I use. https://google.com/ncr which did a good job for years doesn't seem to work anymore.

Really the only reason to refer to Google nowadays is if I deliberately search local places, organizations and businesses - this is where Google is unbeaten in my opinion. Even local news and events isn't usually worth the g! switch. These two might be good in the US but here in Germany all search engines are equally bad at it.

DDG skews very heavily towards your country setting indeed, and the default is indeed the USA, but Google is even worse. On DDG the locale selector is a switch displayed on every search results page. For Google, you have to use a VPN for the same effect.

I'm a Dutchman living in Germany speaking English at home and at work, so I switch between languages quite a lot: Dutch when I want to know local things (e.g. European laws, or recipes with ingredients that stores here actually carry), German when I need to know something like filing taxes or when trash is being picked up (I don't speak German yet, so I only do this when necessary), and English for everything else. Trying to do that on Google is nearly impossible. It somewhat picks up on the language of your query (certainly better than DDG picks up on that), but for English queries I'll still get a few German results, even after I click the "Change to English?" prompt (and I have to click every time, since I do not store cookies for Google). Like, thanks for this German forum thread when looking for an error message after I already set it to English... In DDG you can just flip a switch.

This. At least DDG gives you the option (prominently) to quickly and easily "nationalise" a query, if you want to, and doesn't try to impose its guess on you.

I've often found it annoyingly hard to get Google products back to a language I understand while traveling (no, the "append `&hl=en` to the URL" trick doesn't always work...)

The problem with falling back only 20% to 25% of the time is that you don't know what you've missed. By going to Google you already realize it is a better engine. What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?

> What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?

Is it self sabotaging to not drive a Mercedes (or Audi or Tesla or what you think is best).

Or is it a choice you made to go down a notch in quality to gain something else?

Edit: besides I originally moved because I was really annoyed that Google couldn't respect my searches, so I didn't feel I lost much.

Sadly lately DDG has been copying Googles bad habit of fuzzing my searches to death.

Yes it is, if <insert your favorite expensive car here> is the same price as your Hyundai (that is, free). If however you moved because you found Google's results to be inferior, then that is a perfectly valid reason.

As for the "something else" gain, my concern with this is that it is only claimed, not observed. You don't know what DDG does with your data, you have their word for it. You might think that they don't use your data because you don't see personalized results, but what people forget is that DDG is not a search engine in itself but rather a wrapper around other search engines: Bing, and the Russian search engine Yandex. At least Bing does not provide personalized search results as-a-service.

> Yes it is, if <insert your favorite expensive car here> is the same price as your Hyundai (that is, free). If however you moved because you found Google's results to be inferior, then that is a perfectly valid reason.

In my case the price was higher and for a while the results were better.

By a huge margin the most frequent time I drop back to Google is because they have unit conversions built in. So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

It's basically replaced my TI-89 for years, I hate doing calculations with units by hand and it's super error prone to not include them in the calculations.

For everything else, duckduckgo has consistently provided a suitable result to answer my question for 90%+ of stuff, no worse than Google. It's super rare for me to check if Google has better results for normal things. I see them as a different ordering rather than superior ordering, so I think of Google more as an alternative than a fallback. They clearly both interpret whether a site is a good match using different algorithms but I don't know I'd say one is strictly superior.

DuckDuckGo does do unit conversions “100 JPY in EUR” [1] and unit-less calculations “2^32 - 1” [2].

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=100+JPY+in+EUR

[2]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2%5E32-1

But like you I drop back for unit-aware calculations. For those an alternative to Google is Wolfram Alpha “!wa speed of light / 400nm in terahertz” [3] which also allows for symbolic computation “!wa integral of 2x” [4].

[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!wa+speed+of+light+%2F+400nm+in+te...

[4]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!wa+integral+of+2x

When DDG fails for a conversion I usually append !wa and Wolfram Alpha parses it easily

>So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

sheesh...

Made me feel super dumb for googling "10kg in pounds"

> So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

You can use the command-line program units(1) to do this, available on all Unices. (The preinstalled version on macOS is horribly outdated though, so you might have to look for a newer version in Homebrew.)

  $ units --verbose
  Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-02-20 
  3070 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units

  You have: c / 400 nm
  You want: terahertz
        c / 400 nm = 749.4811449999999695137376 terahertz
        c / 400 nm = (1 / 0.001334256380792608193130988) terahertz

The only drawback is that getting up-to-date currency exchange rates requires running an extra program, units_cur.

Is there any quantitative data that you can get to show how "good" the results are vs google?

>I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches

Why not use the Startpage bang? (!s)

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130

If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

that's an awesome idea!

how do you determine which IPs are the google webcrawler, though?

I match the user agent string on containing "Google". It seems that Google Chrome only includes "Chrome", so I don't block users this way. Here is an overview of all Google crawlers' user agent strings: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943 As you can see, they all include Google (capitalized).

I don't use robots.txt because they say that doesn't stop them from including the site in search results: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608 I don't know if returning a HTTP 403 error will, but it seems like it's worth a try.

I also looked into banning IP ranges (that would have been my preferred option), but if I remember correctly they were subject to change and it seems overkill to write a scraper for that page that would then have to generate a config file and reload a service.

The documented way is the noindex tag (in html or http headers): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Not all resources are HTML so I couldn't use the meta tag, but the header looks interesting! Reading up on it, it seems to achieve pretty much the same thing as my current solution. Would you say this is better for some reason? Nobody should encounter my server's 403 response except those with a Google user agent anyway.

The page doesn't say whether this works the same as the robots.txt disallow, where you may still appear in results because other pages link to you. The 403 might be more effective, but I can't really tell either way.

great point, but at that point you have to trust google with your data.

and if you are taking this action in protest, you probably don't.

if you don't serve the data at all, whether or not to respect your "noindex" is imposed on google, rather than being a suggestion (like "do not track" in the chrome browser; we all know how that turned out)

No need, you can block them by user agent, they are consistent - or just disallow them in robots.txt.

If you need to make sure it's actually a google bot when a client shows up with the user agent, you can use reverse dns: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553

I mean, that's great and all. But I actually want people to use my website.

So do I, but my livelihood does not depend on it, so I can safely do this and encourage people to use another search engine. Any other search engine. Even if you fall back to Google if you can't find something, at least use another search engine by default. I don't think that's too harsh to ask of a tech audience (which is the audience of my websites).

Of course, if your websites generate income based on people that came from google, I would not expect you to follow suit. As I mentioned in the post, the idea is that there are lots of resources on the web that are not there to turn a profit, but that are still valuable to people. Google is not listening when we use words, so I took action.

But... how does this encourage anyone to do anything? No one knows who you are or what your site is, and I'm sure Google couldn't care less. This sounds like the technical equivalent of someone refusing to drive on public roads because taxation is theft or something.

The "google couldn't care less" part I address in the post as well: I'm well aware that my site by itself will never have any significant impact.

As for how it encourages anyone to do anything: one site is not enough, but if a few people do this, the word starts to spread that you might need to try another search engine to find the more obscure things on the internet. People here seem to like the idea (judging by its positioning in the thread), and a lot of the tech community reads this. A few minutes ago, someone reached out via chat because they recognized my username. Those are the people that also make decisions at google or friends of people that make those decisions.

I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's more like voting than like your taxation comparison: your vote never matters, why bother? You don't have a voice in the government. None. But still, people vote. Collectively, we can make a difference.

From what I recall, Bing also displays AMP pages. Wouldn't you want to block crawls from Bing too?

I didn't know that, though Bing is not in enough of a position of power to abuse it. If they suddenly take over the vast majority of search queries from Google, this might become relevant, but that seems unlikely. For now, I'm happy if some competition is reintroduced in the search engine 'market'.

Doesn't this ultimately make the situation worse since now less people will see that page in the first place?

i.e. the only people that will (likely) see it are the ones that are already doing what you want.

Would someone who wants to do this use Google? Even if you google for how to block google from your website, you are likely looking to block Google from pages like phpmyadmin, not all of their website. I don't think this blog post would ever be a relevant search result in Google. Maybe if someone saw this comment, tells a friend, and $friend googles it... It just seems like a remote chance.

DDG's search results seem consistently terrible whenever I try to use it for an extended period of time. It's fine for really basic searches, but anything more specialized or niche is terrible (considering my interests, that's all of my searches). I mostly use Startpage nowadays instead, which seems to give me good enough results most of the time.

I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first even when I search for super generic words. That's why people think DDG doesn't do a good job but I think it does if you can be more specific.

Yet I agree it's not better than or equal to Google when it comes to image search. I guess Google is doing a better job on classifying images.

I believe privacy, to me as a user, is a huge advantage. I have been using DuckDuckGo for years now and I when I run into something I can’t find on it, which happens sporadically, I use !s to jump to anonymous google results on start page and it turns out I can’t find it with google either. So either DuckDuckGo has gotten better or I have gotten better at telling it what I want, or both. Either way, I don’t feel that privacy puts me at a disadvantage.

Oh, no. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't trying to say privacy is bad, I was trying to say Google has a clear advantage since it knows more about the user. Don't think it's worth to compromise your privacy though.

Another advantage of Google is having the vast resources they have but again, it works because they know who you are.

I also agree with what you said. People just need to be more specific with their search and yes, DDG is going better by the day.

>I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first

One way to compensate is to be very specific.

Ex: "python programing language string slice" not just "python slice".

Most people have (without consciously thinking about it) learned to treat search terms as labels on a venn diagram with the center being the search results.

To get the most out of DDG search like it's 1999 - be specific and use operators

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/syntax/

I've been using DDG exclusively for a few years now. I don't want to get into anything personal, but just what the heck are you searching for, my man?

I hear this complaint from time to time and it just baffles me. I mean one day I forgot how to spell "guillotine", typed in "french beheading thing", and it was on the first page somewhere.

That query is essentially a textbook example, not hard at all.

DDG uses a combination of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex results. From what I can tell they don't index SPA sites very well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/90ypqz/ddg_craw...

A comment from July 2018:

> We get our results from various sources, mostly Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (more info: https://duck.co/help/results/sources ) so if/when they introduce support for SPAs, we should get that too. I don't know what their plans are for this, however.

These sorts of posts make me feel a bit stupid - I use search engines other than DDG less than once a week. Are my searches so banal and obvious? Do I not encounter tricky technical problems?

However, in the rare cases that I do switch to Startpage (!s), I get "better" results only sometimes. Conversely, on Google I miss the bangs, the capability to scroll through the results using up/down cursor key (and enter to go to a result), the simple way to specify country specific results (I don't care about Moscow, Idaho and its 23000 inhabitants very much, sorry).

As an example of this that can be demonstrated right now (and potential insight into why this is the case), search for "HTTPS tutorial" in DuckDuckGo[1].

This search is expected to return results that provide a tutorial on the implementation or usage of the HTTPS protocol. The first three results seem decent enough, then things get weird. What follows on the first two pages or so are (in order) tutorials for: Ubuntu, PARCC, HTTP (relevant), VPN, React, R (language), Windows 10, Shiny (related to R?), Matplotlib, scratch.mit, AutoHotKey, Quickbooks, Node.js, Java, Python and Kubernetes. As far as returning results for HTTPS tutorials DuckDuckGo has seemingly not done very well. Many of these results are related to software so one would expect these sites to have well-executed SEO. It looks to me like DuckDuckGo has confused the "https://" in the URL for an indicator of content related to HTTPS. But does Google's search algorithm do any better?

Try the same search in Google[2] and it seems to have similar problems: if you go several pages deep the results still do not acknowledge that "https" is missing from the actual content of the result. But the fact that Google is used more frequently has allowed relevant results to bubble up to the top because people click on them. Only one result on the first page does not pertain to HTTP, HTTPS or SSL. Google's advantage seems to disappear after the first page and that makes sense because anything beyond the first page of Google search is rarely clicked.

I don't see DuckDuckGo's problem as being one of how it searches but rather its lack of usage. Maybe if we use it and talk it up to people we can work our way towards a powerful search engine that respects privacy. I could put up my own search engine and try to do better but I would be a decade behind DuckDuckGo's name recognition and that much farther from solving the actual problem.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=https+tutorial&t=ffab&atb=v144-1&i...

2. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=https+t...

I like DuckDuckGo if it wasn't for their data centers being in the U.S. My problem lies in the fact that they could have an intelligence agency like the NSA in their data centers and they could attribute specific queries to specific users by looking at the originating IP. I'm not even sure they have a canary[0] [1] implemented. This is why combining DDG with an anonymous mixer network like Tor is useful (or even a VPN). You're probably wondering why my threat model includes the likes of the NSA. Well I just don't want spying, simple as that.

Sure, Tor might seem like overkill, but over time all those single, isolated queries start to build an elaborate dossier on you and the contents of your mind.

[0] https://duck.co/forum/thread/15228/would-you-adopt-a-canary

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

What search engine do you use then?

I use a few. Putting all my eggs in one basket is a bad idea in general. If you must know, I do use DDG, but strictly with Tor and sometimes a VPN. In no order:

https://eu.startpage.com

https://www.searx.me/

https://www.ecosia.org/

https://millionshort.com/

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://www.qwant.com

(All used with Tor and sometimes a VPN)

I like qwant.com. No affiliation.

- "python remove from list": Google has the Python docs on the first page. DDG does not.

- "site:news.ycombinator.com rms_returns duckduckgo": At first the DDG results looked better but multiple results had no mention of "rms_returns" at all.

- "archlinux dmesg audit": Both nice.

- "lange nacht der museen berlin": Wow, unexpectedly relevant results on DDG, did they improve their local results?

I think I should indeed try again. Previous times it was full of spam for local results.

For your first query, DDG returns StackOverflow link which I think could be even more important for those searching about how to remove an item from python list.

Thanks for providing examples, I'm always baffled by those that claim that Google results are so much better.

- "python remove from list": DDG returns the stack overflow answer (mentioning `del`). If I wanted the docs, I'd put in the !py3 bang, which uses the python 3 documentation search.

- "site:news.ycombinator.com rms_returns duckduckgo": yeah, DDG is fuzzing the search terms annoyingly, though I've heard that complaint about google as well? I've had more luck adding a plus, "site:news.ycombinator.com +rms_returns duckduckgo"

lol well I just search and duckduckgo has almost nothing -but- python (the language) links about removing from a list. Are you sure you didn't make a typo? I suppose it is possible duckduckgo saw your search comment and "fixed" it, but I have my doubts. If you wanted site specific stuff add site:python.org

I use DDG regularly. It's fine for casual "was that company's domain a .net or .com" kinds of searches, but it struggles for more specific or obscure content. My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time. I don't have examples for this because the behavior is not consistent at all. The "inurl" and "intitle" operators exist but seem to only work for a single word/instance (e.g. "functional intitle:Haskell" works as expected but "functional intitle:Haskell intitle:reactive" returns a bunch of results without either of those words in the title).

> "My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time."

This is the exact explanation of why I moved away from Google.

My searching trends toward very specific terms. >2 years ago, Google started ignoring my boolean operands. It became increasingly difficult to craft a boolean search that Google would actually respect.

I finally bailed 6 months ago. By that time, using a minus sign often returned nothing but the results I was trying to avoid.

DDG is just a proxy for Bing. Yes, let's degoogle our lives, but why not start using a free/libre metasearch engine (like Searx[0]), while you're at it?

[0]: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

Citation needed.

They use Bing Ads, but I’m not sure if their actual search results are just proxied Bing results.

They are not exclusively Bing, but mostly. I think Wikipedia has the details.

They seem to even let you turn ads off in the settings.

I think nowadays they mix in some results from other search engines, but it started out as just Bing results. Doesn't change the point about it being just a proprietary interface to other proprietary search engines.

> We do use results from Bing. Our zero-click info and some other stuff we do, however, uses results from all over.[0]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180910181021/https://duck.co/f...

It’s still my default but results are becoming noticeably worse. For instance, I used to be able to search for uncommon names and have them surface; now DDG seems to try really hard to assume I meant some dictionary word (frankly, a search engine clearly ignoring your actual search term becomes useless really quickly).

A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages; as long as that’s true I will always start from DDG.

Searching an esoteric error message with lots of search terms never returns anything relevant on DDG, so that's usually when I add the !g.

> A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages;

Why is that?

> DDG seems to try really hard to assume I meant some dictionary word (frankly, a search engine clearly ignoring your actual search term becomes useless really quickly)

I wonder whether that's due to users using mobile more and more, where typos are much more frequent. It is very annoying indeed, and coaxing it with quotes and/or plusses doesn't seem to yield consistent results.

I launched BuckBuckMoose.org recently so I could start using DuckDuckGo more often. The idea with BuckBuckMoose is that you can search DuckDuckGo without fear of missing out on Google. How it works is you simply enter your search query, and then a two split screen windows pop up with Google search results on the left and DuckDuckGo results on the right. If you want to try it out as your default search engine you can use Tom Schuster's "Add Custom Search Engine" extension for Firefox to add it (BuckBuckMoose) as your default search engine. (I don't actually expect anyone else to use it). Anyway, having used this tool daily for the past few months I feel that I'm somewhat of an expert* on DuckDuckGo's search results. One interesting thing I've noticed is how similar their results are. It's almost as if Bing is trying to mimic Google's results on purpose? It's a little odd. The results are pretty good tho. However, I have noticed that Google is always a little bit faster.

Hmm, I went to http://buckbuckmoose.org and noticed no TLS. Perhaps it doesn't need crypto because the popups themselves utilize crypto.

If I'm logged into google do I get my customized search results? Would be nice to have a choice on this behavior (actually, would be interesting to have an iframe for each mode to see the difference in results).

Have you tried Searx[0]?

It returns results from the major search engines (and can be customized for more) while attempting to maintain privacy as much as possible. I'm not sure how effective it actually is from a privacy standpoint, but being able to see aggregate results in a single, clean UI has been a big productivity boost for me. I've been running a self-hosted instance for a few months now and haven't had major complaints.

[0]: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now. I must admit, when doing research, I often g! the search as well to see what I'm missing out on, especially with images. I also don't know why they don't offer a year parameter for the advance time search. It's a pretty good engine nonetheless. I use wikipedia a lot, so w! proves useful.

And, btw, !wxx, where xx is the two letter ISO language code (!wde, !wes, !wla...).

For the uninitiated, !bang is a pretty great feature:

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

What are your most used bangs? Mine is !gi.

Am I the only one who really doesn't like having to prefix that symbol and never types bangs? I type faster than most other tech people but putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger is more trouble than adding a keyword for the search in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). Especially because I type the G, Y, and W (google, google-images, youtube, wikipedia... the thing you use this for) with my left hand as well.

Bangs are recommended almost every time ddg comes up, and I see people like my brother using them, so it seems like nobody else minds and the choice of symbol will never change. Am I alone in thinking it's one of the worst possible prefix characters?

That’s an odd complaint when I first read it

Maybe it relates to hand pain and stuff

You could use right shift, also, though that’d be tricky for my brain

Maybe it helps to know that I'm a Vim user and I notice the difference it makes when having to move my hand to the mouse (or even the arrow/home/page-up keys) to position my cursor as opposed to using Vim key bindings?

Doing a ! doesn’t really shift much from home row positioning. Certainly not as much as arrow keys would

I do understand the thought though. After doing a few years on a mac and learning to love pushing cmd with my thumb, which was a lot of actions like cut copy paste and more, I began to hate if I had to use left pinky for anything ctrl related

Even on linux or windows today I’ll map ctrl directly left of spacebar so I can keep the same habit up

It’s naturally great for me in vim too, be it moving up and down the page with ^d and ^u or some custom ^ mapping, etc

I think if you're a heavy command line user or even programmer, you'll be having to do ! and ` and ~ and so on, meaning -- it's some pretty solid muscle memory

You can surely think of a better choice

,⟨prefix⟩ for example

Indeed, pretty much all of the pinky-operated non-dead symbols on the right would be better (so ,./;[]- primarily, maybe also = though that is further away, but not ' because for many people that's a dead key). The comma also universally works for German and French keyboards.

> putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger

Try using your right pinky to press shift when typing a bang.

If you want to just use one hand, try holding shift with pinky and hitting 1 with your middle finger. Slightly less stretching.

I might try the right shift, that's not a bad idea. Still the delay of a redirect, but might be useful when on mobile or when not using my own computer. Thanks for the suggestion!

> Try using your right pinky to press shift when typing a bang.

That's the way I do it, and I'd have thought the only way to do it.... you assign fingers to keys, and if you need the shifted key, you use the other hand to press shift and the original designated finger to hit the key itself. The way GP describes it sounds painful.

Middle finger stretch is what I do, haven't noticed it being a problem before but I'll pay attention from now on. Haven't really thought about it.

I hate having to use a prefix at all. I set up my own custom search in chrome that points to my app that does specialized searches based on the first letter and then defaults to a regular DDG query. For example, e foo searches ebay for foo, a foo searches amazon, m 123 main searches maps.

I had similar thoughts, and was pleased to find that the `!` prefix allows you to place the bang anywhere in the query so I tend to slip it in at the end (which feels more natural to me).

I would but one of the biggest problems I have with it is how I can't look up info. in certain areas like Reddit which I use a lot because it only gives one link even if I include the word "reddit".

I just did a search for "switch reddit" and got at least 5 different subreddits. Maybe I misunderstood what you meant?

Also, while it makes you dependent on the reddit search, there's the "!r" search shortcut.

I use "site:reddit.com" all the time on ddg, no problems whatsoever with the results.

I find it mind-boggling that privacy-conscious folks go for DDG. This is a company that hides in their FAQ that their results are also backed by Yandex [1], and the first thing they ask you to do when you go to their home page is install a Chrome extension, giving them full access to your machine, let alone your searches.

[1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

I have degoogled myself heavily and don’t use anything other than Maps once in a while, but DDG is not the best answer as a replacement for people who just want to get things done. Instead of telling people to use DDG alone, it’s better to tell people to use DDG, Searx, and others so that there’s choice and freedom.

I use DDG as my primary search engine, but the quality of search results and the rate of improvement leave much to be desired. So I tend to go to !s (search in startpage) or !g (search on Google). DDG would have to improve by leaps and bounds if it has to be the only search engine that I have to use (or rather, the only search engine who’s direct results I have to use).

Apart from poorer search results, instant answers aren’t great either. DDG has currency conversions as well as stock quotes as instant answers. But both these are so highly hit or miss that I end up going to some other site anyway. For currency conversion, depending on where you put the currency symbol or code (as a prefix or suffix) or if you don’t leave a space between the currency and the numerical value, you may or may not get instant answers. For stock quotes, there are many symbols where, if you just type the symbol, you wouldn’t get instant answers. You’d have to type “<stock symbol> stock”. For some stocks just typing the stock symbol is enough.

The main thing that made me go back to google is the smart results they offer. I search enough for things like "champions league", "PSG vs Inter", "Warriors", "US Open" expecting the smart result at the top (the little widget that embeds the info I want). Switching to DDG I missed that too much and decided to go back to google.

But you can always just add a !g and still get the smart results.

The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine.

That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.

You don't have to use either exclusively. Just pick the one you think is best as your default search engine, and for anything that this 'best' one (by whatever standard) cannot handle, you can still fall back to the other.

For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs. Google is much better at complicated queries (I always struggle for an example, had one recently where DDG was just lost and Google gave the perfect top result, and remember thinking "I should write this down" but I don't think I did...), so I use DDG by default and if I can't find what I'm looking for, I fall back to Google. I don't have to fall back for ~90% of my queries, so that's a significant improvement over using Google all the time.

DDG is horrible at images, and Google Images beats Bing Images. But again, 90% of my image queries can be answered by Bing, so in only 10% of the cases I fall back to Google for images.

> For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs

I've kind of found the opposite.

Because Google knows I'm a developer when I search for libraries etc. they're usually at the top.

For example, if I search for 'express' (the NodeJS package) on Google their website is at the bottom of the first page (just below my local newspaper's website, Paisley Express).

On DuckDuckGo it's 1 from the bottom of the second page.

Of course just a single example but you can see where I'm coming from.

> like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine.

I actually disagree. Googles optimizing function is to get you to visit sites with their ads. Because DuckDuckGo doesn’t have an ad network on every website, their optimization function is to get you to come back to search (where their ads are).

I think people have also missed Google slowly manipulating search results to maximize profit. Their motives are not aligned with people looking for information (at least not any more)

I'm a nerd with pretty mild porn usage and no terrorist habits.

I have 0 reason to not use google. I really don't care if they find out my obsession with electronics and that I have the hots for tall girls.

Out of every company, I'd give Google the nod as most helpful company of my lifetime.

Can someone tell me why I'm wrong?

Because Bing is surprisingly better for porn related searches.

Otherwise... no, I don't think you are. The people who turn out for threads like these are hardly representative. You shouldn't sweat not passing muster with them too much.

Nothing wrong with that, if google works for you then just use it.

Yeah I just tried it again recently and was pretty how much they have improved in the couple of years since I last gave it a shot

I've had a very different experience. In most queries, I see better or equal results in DDG compared to Google, especially since DDG digs up less SEO heavy pages. But occasionally for certain queries, Google returns better results then DDG. I use the !g clause perhaps once a day.

The fact that Google tends to ignore half the query does make that choice easier.

DDG also ignores half the query, so that's a weird thing to say. At least Google has verbatim mode.

It does, but boycotting a search engine that returns garbage in favor of another search engine that returns garbage is easier than if the former actually worked properly.

I've been on DDG since about November/December last year.

I thought I'd probably change back to the Gman within a few days, but I still use it.

And I only today found out about "!g" (I was literally typing "google.com/search?q=terms" into my address bar everytime).

Averaging about 1 in 5 searches I need to go to Google to get my results. Mostly stuff regarding popularity and currentness, like memes e.g., or (admittingly bad and lazy) natural language queries where Google also has an edge.

The privacy aspect isn't necessarily what draws me in, but rather the simple arrow key search result parsing. Google used to have it but I cannot get it to work anymore. Allows me to very quickly skim many results using arrow down -> enter -> Alt+left -> repeat.

Also the ! command is amazing, no more wasted seconds on the homepages of youtube, amazon, ebay (!yt, !a, !e). Now if only we can add arrow key selection to those sites :)

I've been using startpage lately and seem to prefer it to DDG, but they both can give inferior search.

At the risk of being repetitious, I think what I'd like is a completely private search engine that uses only a self-curated list of websites. A year or two of googling and using the good results from that would probably fix me for some time. As usual, switch to google if the results aren't good.

Getting rid of the cruft would be a nice thing.

I use Duck on my desktop for about a year, I think. I noticed that Google got worse during that period to the point I switched default engine on my phone to DDG.

The only drawback I see that DDG sometimes returns strange results for local searches. Even with Poland switch. For example if I typed some restaurant's name I most likely would get some restaurant in Warsaw with the same or similar name.

My biggest beef with ddg is that they do not localize my searches. If I search for "Ferry Schedule" for example, I want the nearest Ferry, not San Francisco. My tech related searches are probably fine on DDG, but my personal life searches (movies, transit, theatre, music, events.....) should all use the best available location information.

I used to feel this too, but once I started getting back into the habit of stating the location I'm interested in in the search it became a non-issue

I’ve started the process:

* move google analytics to stat counter. Might consider their no cookie option.

* moved email to domain based plus zoho. Keeping web inbox zeroed so I’m not to dependent on web mail or zoho

* did a google takeout so I access to old emails of my acc gets shut down.

* Firefox/safari for home browsers

* duck duck go default SE

* ublock origin

In the other direction:

* using material design for a new side project!

Does anyone know how to donate to DDG? It doesn't say on their site, but I want to contribute to their success.

Just disable your ad blocker for their site. They're not a philanthropy, they have a profitable ad-based business model.

Plenty of people (particularly here on HN) consider many or even all forms of advertising to be unethical. I don't think it's fair to ask someone to disable their ad blocker. For someone who never clicks on ads, the revenue generated by disabling is negligible anyway.

Even if they added a Patreon button (or whatever the "ethical" provider is this month), 99.99% of their revenue would still come from ads. Seems like some weird mental gymnastics to pretend their business model wouldn't be what it is.

Like it or not, it's fantasy to pretend that donationware scales beyond individual devs. It's rarely even enough to support individual dev stuff.

I don't think the point is to change their business model. The point is to include an alternative way to support them other than ads. Augment, not replace.

E.g. I remove ads (both in their settings and with an ad blocker). However, I would love to support them. I'd probably pay them more than they'd make off of me in ads, as well.

They use Bing ads. It’s really unfortunate - I’d love to help them and advertise with them, but 99% of my ads will show on Bing and its other properties, which is not what I want to support.

Won't try to justify that Microsoft is no longer as bad as it was in 90s, but IMO Google needs competition.

TBH I miss 90s and early 00s when we had many search engines to choose from. They were only helping using the Internet instead changing it to make it more profitable for themselves.

I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to see ads.

I've been working on a search engine as well. It's screen shot based. That's how frustrated I am using Goog!

Very buggy and can't take much load, but check it out: https://glorp.co/Search/Hacker%20News

I have been using DDG instead of Google but recently became aware of StartPage https://www.startpage.com/ They state they pay Google for their searches but don't track you.

DDG loads painfully slow on Android chrome browser compared to Google search for me. Does anyone know if this is deliberate on Google part? Is there a way to speed up DDG search? I'm using a vpn ad blocker, I wonder if it's something in my host file...

Works fine on me. Might be device specific.

I've been using DDG for a year on my desktop, 6 mo. on phone and laptop, 1 mo. at work.

I don't get the people that are claiming worse results from DDG than google - the only thing I can think is that we write our searches differently. But that seems a long shot.

I've never noticed an issue with it except for things where Google has a specific app for the results, like Google Maps, flights, or reviews. Yelp and Apple Maps are no contest for Google Maps. I can type !g but that's not intuitive to most users. I'm also not sure I get as much benefit since I'm using Google for those things anyway.

There are some queries that governments would be very interested in knowing who did it. As an example could be the query how to make bomb. Does DuckDuckGo hand over this information to government agencies? Information such as ip address, user if etc?

they don't keep logs so it's impossible for them to turn over your search history and ip address

> I seriously don't know what kind of usage DuckDuckGo has right now

Still growing, thankfully. We make our search traffic public here:

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Anecdotally I tried DuckDuckGo and found it really irritating. It is just a bad search engine and seems to not be very good at finding what you need unless what you need is something very common.

Surprisingly, Google seems to listen to what you actually type.

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

100% sure any Google alternative is going to be equally "morally bad" if not worse once it gets even 1% of Google's traffic.

Do you know that DDG is just a sophisticated proxy to another search engine under the hood, which probably has even lower standards for privacy than Google and using DDG you indirectly support it?

Well, yeah... hence the point of a proxy.

1. Yes, and that proxying provides value (privacy)

2. There's more to it, such as the bangs, keyboard-based result selection, etc.

My default search engine for more than a year. Mobile and desktop, rarely I use !g bang.

Also, dns are 1.1.1.1 / 1.1.0.0 Browsers are ff and safari. Email is ProtonMail.

If it offered results that even began to resemble relevance, I would, but Google's the only one covering my country's market with good results.

Aside from DDG, can anyone say anything about other available alternatives, like startpage.com, lite.qwant.com or searchencrypt.com?

I can't stand DDG because it doesn't have a verbatim mode; I end up having to wrap every word in quotes.

Let’s start using DuckDuckGo all the time.

Started last week. So far so good.

I started using it recently, but it doesn't feel as comfortable as google for me.

I switched to DDG a few months ago. I've found it to meet my needs quite well.

startpage.com

Way better in search and privacy

In what way is it better in privacy?

https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html

They use AdWords. This seems like a lateral jump from DDG.

Doesn't seem that different to DDGs (with different search providers), could you highlight the difference that makes them "way better"?

startpage always pays google for search results, which is way better than me paying google for search results. I've basically set startpage for all my browsers for years, and it's always been a good time.

I've been using it for a few months and I find myself using !g for like 4 out of 5 requests. Also image search is VERY slow, images load like in a slideshow. I'll end up going back to Google.

I like the idea of DDG and I have a strong dislike for Google but DDG is simply not there yet. Having said that it's better than it was five years ago, when it was simply insufferable. So, maybe in five years? ;)

Weird, I haven't found their image search slow. I just wish I could search by usage rights.

Also, I suggest using !s instead of !g so that you still get Google results without actually being redirected to Google.

Same. Its fine.

What is this !s and !g notation?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I had no idea. This changes everything for me

That’s odd, that’s not been my experience at all. I’ve been using DDG exclusively for probably 4 years now. I rarely use !g.

In my experience, I've been using it for a few years now and I've maybe used !g 4 or 5 times total in the past couple of years. I find the performance of image searches just fine myself. So it's always fascinating to see that people report such different experiences with DDG.

It's hard to know for sure what's happening though. Maybe my searches are just very simple and don't need anything complex? Maybe I'm luckier and always have fast internet connections? Maybe it's some other factor I'm not thinking of? Who knows without trying to come up with a more systematic way to compare things.

I alsmost never need !s or !g, and I tend to find what I'm looking for. Most of my searches tend to be related to coding, so it just could be that DDG is particularly good at those queries, but I still wonder what exactly it is that people are finding on Google that isn't on DDG. And I used to be one of those people who thought DDG was lousy.

Same, I think it might be something psychological like being used to the Google page.

It's pretty easy to replicate my problems with image search and I suspect what the problem might be.

They have a proxy (just like google) so they don't directly load the images you search for, they make their servers load the images and then send you a proxified version. If you search for obscure terms, they won't have a cached version available so they will have to request it from the actual server, and that makes all images take a while to load. On the other hand Google always keeps the images cached so they can serve them instantly.

When as that? Because I had the same experience of constantly using !g a few years ago. Decided to try ddg again around 6 months ago and it's gotten a lot better imo. Rarely use !g anymore and kept it as my default engine since.

Sometimes ddg results are even straight up better. Most of the time I use !g is when looking up location sensitive stuff, e.g. non-english local government stuff etc.

I had similar experience, at least in my case, I think it is just due to being used to Google. Most of the time I issue !g (when DDG results aren't that good) Google also gives not much better ones.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang If you don’t know what !g is

I'm the other way around, I only have to use !g for 1 out of 5 searches (Google still does a lot better when searching technical topics).

Although I DO get frustrated by DDG's image search. Google's actually takes you to the actual image URL, so it's easier to get a link for sharing. DDG shows all images through their weird proxy thing, such that you can't easily get the raw URL.

To get the raw URL in DDG image search, click on the image and then click "View File". This sends you directly to the image itself.

Try Bing for images. Again not as good as Google, but a whole lot better than DDG -- in terms of search results, that is. In terms of speed, I think Bing and Google images are on par.

Not sure, no problem here, images load almost instantly. Searches are find, maybe a few times a week I use !g because ddg didn't find what I was looking for

Is the moral basis enough to use an inferior product? So just because Google is "bad" does it make ok to use an inferior product? How does that help me as an end user?

OP's only argument (Google is bad so use DDG) is not really convincing tbh

I guess it depends on someone's morals.

If a company does something you disagree with, but you still support them, because it's inconvenient not to it means you are ok with it.

Sorry for getting politics into it, but I see people complaining about current situation, but also don't want to move their assess to protest, because it is inconvenient to do so. Well duh, if you don't want to put an effort, because it would inconvenience you, then you deserve what you are getting.

Not inferior. If you don't like it then use google, no one will cry over your decision. Privacy holds a lot of value for a lot of people, if it doesn't for you then that's your choice and no one is telling you to start taking it seriously, that is a personal issue, tbh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com